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I have a client that does that. We have a weekly meeting that is canceled approximately 95% of the time, almost always the day of. Met like twice in the last six months. I can't use that time - and they won't answer my pleas to cancel the reoccurring nature of the meeting because the 25 people involved don't have any other overlap in the week. I've just had to accept that there's an hour every week that is a black hole.
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Dec 8, 2020 15:41
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Can't decorate your cube if you have to hotel and get a different one every day!
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Jan 21, 2021 20:37
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My company just shifted back our PTO bank from COVID-levels to regular. So I went from 278 out of 288 hours banked to 168 out of 208 hours banked. They took an additional 40 hours so you won't immediately be at your cap. Everything you were over is cashed out. Except it's cashed out as a bonus.
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Mar 11, 2021 00:49
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Yes I mean withholding not actual taxing.
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Mar 11, 2021 02:10
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Less Employees Are Needed
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Mar 31, 2021 21:57
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Work paid for me to get my LSSBB a few years ago. I haven't used a goddamn thing, because my field is writing military health policy. But thanks for the extra salary and career development.
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Mar 31, 2021 23:30
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A Gantt of PMs
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Apr 7, 2021 23:00
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I use an MDM app to get my outlook/webex/timesheet app functional. It doesn't let them do anything outside of the sandbox. It's fine. Now full MDM stuff on your personal phone I wouldn't do.
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Apr 8, 2021 03:24
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TraderStav posted:Curious, do you know the platform they chose? I'm being migrated to Entune this week and believe it won't be an issue, but it'd be good to get at least one data point outside my company. I think it's the Microsoft Authenticator. All I had to do was type some special URL to get it rolling, and every time my password changes I need to authenticate it again so my apps start working.
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Apr 13, 2021 03:48
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Fortunately/unfortunately all of my stuff is based off my CAC/smart card credentials. If I somehow managed a password manager for the stuff I do actually need a password for, I would imagine the grand inquisition of DoD infosec would eventually come and burn me at the stake.
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Apr 14, 2021 21:32
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Unlimited PTO with a mandatory minimum isn't so bad. But yeah, you're rolling the dice on what "unlimited" really means. One of my favorite questions to ask when you're speaking to your potential manager / coworkers is to ask them when the last time they took a vacation. I do it when I'm moving teams even, because every team dynamic is different.
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Apr 26, 2021 18:53
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I'm a project manager for the MIC that specializes in defense health, with a secret clearance and roughly 7 years of PM experience. Which means I get the double whammy of recruiters that 1) try and get me to do poo poo wildly out of my expertise and 2) try and get me to do things considerably over what my flavor of "project manager" does, often for less money. Examples in the last 90 days or so: A contract-to-hire job that requires a considerably higher clearance requirement than I have (which is listed on my linkedin) that is on the other side of the country, which also pays about 60% of what I currently make A "project manager" job that is much more like a full-on program or portfolio manager job (i.e. orders of magnitude more complex) on a project likely worth a few hundred million dollars, also with a considerably higher clearance, which offers about what I make now. Countless jobs to be a project manager in IT services, a thing I know absolutely nothing about and have zero background or keywords in, also with (you guessed it) a considerably higher clearance, that pay anywhere from 30 to 80% of what I make now. I don't think I've ever had a recruiter cold call me with something that I would be remotely interested in.
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Jun 10, 2021 21:03
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Defense contracting just depends on *which* sector you're in. I've been in the field for almost a decade but it's blue as gently caress where I am, but I'm in defense health/analytics/policy. It's also majority women and majority PoC with almost everyone having an MS+. My company has like 30k people and we're relatively small potatoes at like 1500ish personnel. There's a lot of places you can work even inside some of the more kinetic companies that don't remotely involve the more morally icky parts. General Dynamics for example has a healthcare division that is almost 25k people alone. That said there's still your regular large corporate problems stacked on top of the poo poo like security clearances and other MIC-exclusive shenanigans so I don't fault anybody for staying the gently caress away. I'm just saying you can have your standard corporate life without having to worry about designing bombs to kill poor people or some poo poo.
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Jun 10, 2021 22:29
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Halloween Jack posted:"more kinetic companies" is a scary phrase It sure is. That's why I chose it, because people on the internet tend to overly simplify a massive industry. Don't get me wrong, the entire MIC basically shouldn't exist and is just an extension of the government but it's hard to ignore if you're in certain regions of the country. There's a lot of different things to do and it pays really well. Example: for four years I worked for an organization that worked on traumatic brain injury that was in collaboration with the other parts of government health/research. It just so happens the military is a good source of TBIs to do research on and has deep pockets to find better ways to treat them, which is shared with everyone. Vasudus fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Jun 10, 2021 |
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Jun 10, 2021 22:42
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We're currently at 20% capacity but the word on the street is that after the 4th we're going to 50%. My boss's boss would bring everyone back in without exceptions if they could. I would put good money at being 100% by Labor Day. Except my division grew ~15% since the pandemic started and does not have enough seating, and is expected to grow another 20% in the next few months. By the fall we're going to have 45 people and 26 seats. This falls under my problem. Green/Gold teams for everyone! Hope you like having to hotdesk because that's all we've got folks. No, you can't personalize your desk.
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Jun 21, 2021 14:57
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Granted I'm in a very different flavor of consulting (government) but we do a ton of stuff on faith. It usually pays off quite well. As long as it doesn't impact what you're actually there for and doesn't demand too many additional resources. Last year my client had an issue with something that I was vaguely able to help with. I did what I could which solved the immediate problem, and then told them 'you know, we've got people actually trained in this poo poo that can do a much better job' and next thing I know we got cut a check for 700k + another 600k later on. I got two grand out of that deal which is a whole different problem, but it made my yearly comp discussion a lot easier at least.
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Jun 25, 2021 16:58
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I have 11:30am to 1:00pm booked on my calendar every day because people try and book my lunch. I don't eat at that time, I eat at 2pm. It's the principle.
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Jul 16, 2021 03:27
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I try and keep my inbox at zero, but if there's anything that goes longer than like a week it's getting trashed. If the issue hasn't been resolved, if I haven't been pinged via other means, and nobody has asked about it by then, it's not important enough.
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Jul 23, 2021 16:53
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I do way more work when I'm at home, because I'm able to work on my projects while I'm in my endless meetings. Since we've been back to the office (hooray DoD) I've accomplished approximately half of what I used to for the previous 15+ months because when I'm trapped in these meetings I can't do anything but pretend to pay attention and nod politely.
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Aug 26, 2021 23:07
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My company in theory has a very generous rewards program. You can nominate anybody with a public or private citation and attach 100/200/500/1000/2000 bucks to it. Except the program is poorly funded so it basically opens up for a month and then runs out of money. I’ve had three years running now where I’ve nominated someone with a phenomenal award citation and then it’s sat on their supervisors desk for months only to be told “sorry program is out of money now”.
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Nov 26, 2021 03:44
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If those emails hadn’t already been actioned or people didn’t reach out to you directly it wasn’t that important. Delete all.
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Dec 20, 2021 21:46
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Another year, another comp cycle negotiation. Got less than I wanted but more than they originally offered. Third year in a row I've been told that I'm at the top of my band and need to have realistic expectations, yet was still able to wring more blood out of the stone. God this poo poo is exhausting. I'm already starting to think about what I have to do *next* year in order to secure what I want. Probably some bullshit certs that I don't need or want, plus changing projects to something more easily visible. I'm about two years from doing the Onion method of just grabbing my boss by the throat and saying I want more cash right loving now.
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Dec 22, 2021 03:01
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Thanatosian posted:The secret is that there's another company that will likely be more than happy to pay you much more than you're making right now. More? probably after extensive searching. Much more? possible but unlikely. My skillset is relatively niche (I am a project manager / task master that works in military health policy - the combination of those skillsets is what brings me the money) and while I'm basically in the only metro area that my market exists and there are other companies, they've all tried to lowball me in the past. As it stands I have ultimate freedom and good benefits, and it's not like the cash is bad - it's very good. It's just so loving exhausting every year having to justify my existence across the four levels of management needed to approve anything beyond a COLA increase. I legit have to start in September and have some meeting or another every month until now when it finally gets approved. I suppose I'm lucky in that it is still possible to get meaningful raises even after 7 years (this year was 10.32%) but every time it's a knife fight to the bitter end.
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Dec 22, 2021 03:34
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I honestly have no idea how many levels of management I am before the CEO. Maybe a dozen? More than half a dozen at least. But I also have three distinct levels of management. Me -> Career Manager -> Senior Associate -> Principal -> VP (account) -> SVP (market) -> EVP (group) -> CEO. Maybe. I haven't paid any attention since the last re-org. Me -> Program Manager -> Portfolio Manager -> OIC Me -> Client If I left abruptly my project would be absolutely hosed. I'm not necessarily *actually* irreplaceable but I'm drat close to it. It would most likely kill the contract and the company would lose a few million a year from it. None of my bosses have any idea what I do, or have any interest in knowing what I do. They know that I do it well and the client loves me and that's all that matters. At first I offered to teach them all about how to run the office and what sets us apart but when there was no appetite to learn I realized that gently caress em, trade secrets baby.
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Dec 24, 2021 04:05
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One of my responsibilities is daily accountability of all staff - who is working and where they are working and then send the report up higher. This process takes roughly a half hour of my time every day and absolutely positively must be sent up by 0900 every day. No, nobody else has this responsibility in their scope of work or position descriptions. It's an ops function, and I am the lone ops person. No, nobody else has even the faintest idea of how to do it. I am the (or one of the) highest paid people in my entire office.
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Dec 27, 2021 06:01
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On one hand, I should be glad that a relatively simple project that I teed up for everyone to do has gone horribly, horribly wrong in my absence. Good job security. On the other, this is an extremely important briefing that will determine our funding for the next three years and the deck has to be turned in before I am off leave. And it is such a simple project that should be such a slam dunk that I'm questioning if I'm in the twilight zone or not. I pulled literally everyone in to a 30 minute meeting, went over who has what responsibilities and when things need to move along and got verbal confirmation that everyone understood their part in this. I gave everyone a deck with timelines, points of contact, examples, etc. I sent calendar invites to everyone with reminders that the product has to move along to x person on this date and so on. The management of this project is as automated as it possibly can be and I put more time into making sure all this planning was done than the project itself should take. It's seven slides. Seven. One background slide and two slides each for our three projects we're seeking funding for. The background slide is a boilerplate slide. The second slide for each project is a pre-generated series of milestones that I already did for everyone. So it's literally three slides I'm asking people to generate content for: no more than five bullet points, no more than three sentences per bullet. Generate the content, send the thing to strategic communications, send that adjudicated product to the boss, adjudicate his comments, submit the deck to the planner. It is now 13 slides, the math is all horribly wrong, and the other teams were not consulted and are now extremely angry. It has not gone to comms, my boss has been sent three drafts today to review, and we have a hard deadline of the 30th to submit it to the planner.
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Dec 28, 2021 21:28
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:the downside with becoming a project manager is that you are then expected to manage projects A fate worse than death. Lockback posted:I mean, try to do both if you can get someone to pay for it and you want to spend the time. But my point is more "There is no class/program that will let you jump into a management job without imposter syndrome/significant adjustment". But getting an MBA or certs will make you worth more for sure. I have both my PMP and my LSSBB and neither of them provide any value to how I manage projects. They do however boost my salary by approximately 30%
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Jan 4, 2022 22:46
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And here I was thinking that the HR guy hitting on people recently divorced (name change back to maiden name personnel action) was creepy. God drat. I don't get to do any financial planning with projects beyond scoping how many hours it will take my contract staff to do. Government is entirely uninterested in how much time things take with anybody on their direct payroll. I tried once to explain to them how much each of their employees hours cost (really easy and mostly accurate since MIL/CIV paygrades are easily accessible) to judge how much a project "costs" and was patted on the head and told never bother them with such details again.
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Jan 6, 2022 02:19
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Being good at your job doesn't mean you'll get advancement.
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Jan 10, 2022 19:40
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Speaking of bad fits in interviews: I was poaching another contractor that the client loves but their contract is sunsetting. They were okay at best, but the value was keeping the person with the client. I make the approach, they're on board, I tell them the basics of what to expect with our interview process. You interview with leadership to see why they should hire you into the firm, with lower leadership as to what your role would be, and then finally with a technical expert to verify you have the skills. Easy peasy compared to coming in off the street - I had room in the budget and cleared the way so all they had to do was clear the interviews. It's about as much of a softball as you can get. They then proceed to completely fail to explain what they do, what value it brings, or why we should hire them. They get nitpicky and correct the technical interviewer several times with the wrong corrections that they were called out on. They were also late by a few minutes to the first one, and asked to end the technical interview a few minutes early. And to top it off, they ask for approximately 40% more than what they are worth and nearly double what they're paid at this moment (they make 75k, we were offering 90k, they asked for 140k). I was so flabbergasted at how badly the interview went I've refused to acknowledge that this person exists and I'm letting them disappear into the void at the end of the coming week when their contract expires. If I didn't see the interview notes and have everyone reach out to me with a 'yo what THE gently caress' phonecall I wouldn't have believed it went that badly.
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Jan 22, 2022 20:37
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At least on my side of (government) consulting, contracts typically are bid with a small number of key personnel. Those people's resumes are included in the bid, and are tied to that contract for the duration. Swapping them out requires the government to approve the replacement. Not filling a key position for various reasons incurs all sorts of payment penalties. However even then you're still dealing with a small fraction of the total workforce - a small contract with 20 FTEs might have two or three key personnel, and a contract with 150 FTEs might have a dozen at most. Then you add the fact that staying in the same job/position for longer than like 18 months will actively hurt your corporate career progression and yeah, you've got lots of turnover. I'm on year 3.5 of a contract for a client and I am the only person out of 12 that has been there for longer than a year. But I'm also never going to get further on corporate side so I don't really give a poo poo.
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Jan 23, 2022 16:50
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:at that point it isn't consulting, it's contract labor Kind of yeah. By virtue of my position there's long-term need here; I have an infinite amount of work. I *could* just jump ship whenever I wanted but I'm a creature of habit. Other people on my contract are brought in for specific projects that last however long - they do their job and then gently caress off.
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Jan 23, 2022 18:16
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Before I got yelled at several times (and eventually by someone that actually had pull) when 5:01pm would hit I would immediately put my mic on and crack open a can. Inevitably someone would comment on it, and I would say 'it's past 5pm, you're on my time now'. The can was fizzy water. I might have gotten a talkin' to, but at least they stopped.
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Feb 1, 2022 19:37
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I'm still in awe that last week I received an after-hours phonecall from my outgoing contract's PM asking me to reconsider my choice to depart. He offered me literally nothing - no salary bump, no title bump, no promotion (which I left for my new work specifically to get all three) but told me that "the team will be really sad" that I'm leaving. The team that I'm in a group chat with where we're all actively helping each other find new work because we all hate it here now. I suspect it comes from facing the reality of having to hire three different people to properly replace me. If he wasn't a teetotaler I would think he was drunk when he asked me. It was the saddest, most disappointing attempt that really caps off my time here.
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Mar 11, 2022 17:10
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Look what you need to do is have your coworker on your past project be you new supervisor, and your supervisor from two projects ago now be your peer. Who all report to someone that worked for you two projects ago. No, this isn't confusing at all, why do you ask. God bless the matrix.
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Mar 14, 2022 16:15
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I've determined at this point that I'm not going back into the office for more than two days a week for the rest of my career. gently caress em. My current project that I'm just switching to 100% has a mandatory 40% on-site requirement because some of our work literally can't be done outside of a windowless box and that's fine, because it's also a hard upper limit - two days a week, no more no less.
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Mar 30, 2022 22:15
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I'm breaking the brains of my new team by trying my best to rigidly enforce my favorite workplace rule: Nothing New After Two. No, it wasn't a mistake that I forgot to ask for graphics support from our junior. I didn't ask because the product is due in two weeks, the support I need will take two hours, the graphic is for the appendix, and I'm not requesting someone do it at 4:15pm. I'll request it at the scrum the next morning. I'm going to get it engraved on a plaque and put it behind my desk for the camera to see. Nothing. New. After. Two.
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Apr 8, 2022 20:19
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We're having hilarious trouble recruiting people right now because of the WFH saga during the pandemic. Company is well over 100 years old and has *never* had trouble recruiting people. Management is having a hell of a time coming to grips with "if the client doesn't physically demand them in the office, let them work from home full time, who gives a poo poo"Dango Bango posted:How loving tone deaf can you be?! is that a challenge
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Apr 13, 2022 18:22
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One perk of being in the MIC consulting industry is that salaries are pretty competitive and there's always a small contract shop trying to lure people away from the larger firms with more bux. Every year I do market research so I can scream for more money and it has never been very difficult to find out what everyone else is paying. The gamble is always "am I willing to go through the annoyance of switching companies" which thankfully I have not had to do yet. If I went to the balcony of my company's main headquarters I can throw my resume folded like a paper airplane and probably get three calls before the end of the day. At least as long as the "TS/SCI" part was easily visible. The con of course is that no matter what I'm chained to this accursed swamp for the rest of my career.
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Apr 14, 2022 00:10
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:It's performance review time, probably my least favourite time of the year (even less than "hey everybody it's audit season!"), and in opening a reportee's self review I thought "well ok at least these comments are relatively short this year" and got part way through before I saw the "more" link. For the last four years or so my career manager and I have had a gentleman's agreement: I won't write goal statements, and I'll give him five-star glowing manager reviews, he gets me the money I ask for every comp cycle. We're currently doing a big internal shakeup and I'm clinging on to him for dear life because I have him very well trained and I just do not want to do this poo poo every year if I can avoid it.
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Apr 19, 2022 14:59
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